Last stop, Saigon!

Our last open-tour bus ticket was really a large van that left at 7am instead of an overnight. It was a good 7-hour trip, and an overnight would have been much more ideal. Amy and I split from the pack and headed down to Saigon on our own. 


Saigon was hot and humid and that traffic was unbelievable - and I thought LA was bad. It's just that rather than cars, the streets were flooded with motorbikes. 

Bikes come at you from every direction. I exercised extreme caution while crossing, and Amy and I often held hands running across the streets, dodging motorbikes. I felt like I was ten again. Finally, we dropped our bags at a guesthouse and wandered around the city. We checked out the night market and enjoyed some pho. 

The next day, we went to the Cu Chi Tunnels, shot some AK-47s and went to the War Remnants Museum - formerly known as the American War Museum. A lot of war-related sights for one day. in the morning, we checked out of our hotel and headed towards the Cambodian border.

We were a few hours into our first bus ride when we realized that our hotel didn't return our passports in exchange for the room key - 50% our own stupidity and 50% the hotel staff's. We scurried to the front of the bus and got the guide to work on sorting out the situation for us. We went on with our day, saw some floating markets went on a long boat ride up the Mekong, checked out a crocodile farm, a candy factory and spent a night on a floating hotel on the Mekong.

In the morning, we took a boat up to some village along the river - this is where, by some miracle, our passports showed up and we were finally reunited with them. 

We continued on the boat to the Cambodian border where we saw Joyce for the first time since Hoi An. We wouldn't let her go again.